Higher Education Quick Takes

Quick Takes

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is today releasing a report calling for a "master plan" for higher education in the Midwest. The report -- by James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan -- argues that the region needs to think about higher education more strategically as a region, not just as individual states or institutions. The "Bologna process" -- by which European higher education has become much more linked across national boundaries -- is cited as an example, both for its coordination and also for the broad consultation that produced the effort. The time for collaboration is evident, the report says, from the changes already taking place. "No university can control the growth of knowledge nor the educational needs of a society. Information technology is rapidly eliminating the barriers of space and time that have largely shielded campus activities from competition," the report says.

An appeals court has overturned an award of $2.5 million to a former associate controller at Florida International University who claimed he lost his job in a reorganization because of racial discrimination, The Miami Herald reported. The court found that the former employee failed to meet required standards of proof that racial discrimination was a factor. The university maintained that the reorganization -- which involved an entire division -- was based on problems with the old structure.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs needs to improve the outreach and support it provides to military veterans who receive federal education benefits, the Government Accountability Office said in a report on Wednesday. The report examined the agency's process for making veterans aware of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill and other veterans' education programs and for ensuring that schools and veterans meet eligibility rules, among other things, and found room for improvement in some areas.

The revived Antioch College has announced its first three faculty hires. Faculty members and alumni of the institution that Antioch University shut down have been pushing for the rehiring of professors from the old Antioch College, while the administration has been insisting on new searches for all openings. Of the first three hires, two are finishing their doctorates, while one is a faculty member who taught at the previous Antioch and is now coming back.

Gov. Jerry Brown's announcement late Tuesday that budget talks with Republican leaders had reached a dead end -- seemingly dooming an effort to put extensions of tax increases before voters in June -- puts California's public colleges in a (more) dire situation, the institutions' leaders said. The University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges systems have warned that a budget solution that did not include voter-passed extensions of existing taxes would double the size of the already hefty cuts they are facing ($500 million for each of the two university systems and $400 million for the two-year institutions). With Brown ending talks with Republicans, he said, because they insisted on what he called an "ever-changing list of collateral demands" -- though political observers also said poll numbers were not looking favorable, either -- campus leaders spoke Wednesday as if the June ballot measure were dead. “Without a June special election on Gov. (Jerry) Brown’s tax extension proposal, the chance of an all-cuts budget is highly likely,” Jack Scott, chancellor of the community college system, said in a news release. “An $800 million reduction would be unprecedented and an absolute tragedy for our students, faculty and staff as well as a deep blow for our economy.”

An Associated Press survey of colleges' policies designed to prevent drug use by athletes has found them to be widely inconsistent. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has one set of rules, athletic conferences vary widely on their rules, and colleges are all over the place, the survey found.

Faculty members at Essex County College have voted no confidence, 101 to 6, in Edythe Abdullah, who is in her first year as president, The Star-Ledger reported. The resolution adopted called her "unresponsive, indecisive, untimely and an untrustworthy administrator." Much of the anger, the newspaper reported, came from Abdullah's push for more of a role in evaluating candidates for tenure, delaying the process for those professors up for promotion this year. Abdullah told the Star-Ledger, "Maybe I’ve gotten off to a rocky start in doing that. Maybe there have been some mistakes. Maybe I don’t understand the political culture enough here to have as smooth a start as I would have liked."

The U.S. Education Department announced Tuesday that it is fining Virginia Tech $55,000 for violations of federal laws in the university's response to the mass killings that took place there on April 16, 2007. The fine focuses on the university's failure to immediately warn students of the danger -- after the university learned of the first shooting. Virginia Tech officials have maintained that they acted based on the best information they had at the time, and that they did not realize the potential for the killings that would take place later in the day.

Faced with a pending vote of no confidence, the president of Florida's Edison State College has agreed to reassign a senior administrator with whom faculty members said they could no longer work effectively, the Naples Daily News reported. The removal of James Browder as senior vice president was one of a series of concessions that President Kenneth Walker reportedly made after a Faculty Senate meeting at the Florida college boiled over and set up a vote of no confidence in Walker, the newspaper reported. Among the other concessions was an agreement to consider the re-hiring of another senior official, Steve Atkins, who resigned this month after Browder was promoted from a vice president's position.

The University of Southern California may discipline the students involved in photographs -- which went viral Tuesday -- showing a couple having sex on the roof of a university building, the Los Angeles Times reported. University policy bars unauthorized access to the roofs of buildings. The photographs are available here.